SF coffee shop turns down Salesforce contract in...

Nick Cho prepares a latte at Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. Cho immigrated to the U.S. as a toddler and feels a personal connection to the issue of families separated at the border.

Photo: Kathleen Duncan / The Chronicle 2015

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Nick Cho pours out tea to steep at Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. He and his co-owner, Trish Rothgeb, have a cafe on Union Street.

Photo: Kathleen Duncan / The Chronicle 2015

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Nick Cho steams milk at Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. The company gets opportunities to brew thousands of cups of coffee at massive conferences only a few times a year, so declining a $40,000 Salesforce ... more

Nick Cho steams milk at Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. The company gets opportunities to brew thousands of cups of coffee at massive conferences only a few times a year, so declining a $40,000 Salesforce contract was a big deal. less

Photo: Kathleen Duncan / The Chronicle 2015

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks during the grand opening ceremony of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco this year. “Salesforce always will be true to our core values,” Benioff tweeted this month. ... more

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks during the grand opening ceremony of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco this year. “Salesforce always will be true to our core values,” Benioff tweeted this month. “We dont work with CBP regarding separation of families.” less

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

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A crowd of Dreamforce attendees cross Howard and 4th Streets in San Francisco last year. Dreamforce, a huge annual conference run by Salesforce, takes place September 25-28 this year.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle 2017

A San Francisco coffee company has joined the outcry over the services Salesforce provides to U.S. Customs and Border Protection by turning down a $40,000 contract to serve drinks at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference.

Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters gets opportunities to brew thousands of cups of coffee at massive conferences only a few times a year. So when George P. Johnson Experience Marketing, which contracts with Salesforce to provide catering services for Dreamforce, reached out to Wrecking Ball owners Nick Cho and Trish Rothgeb, the two said they eagerly entered into discussion.

“For us as a coffee roaster, I can say that $40,000 would pay for our raw coffee supply for about two months,” Cho wrote in an email.

Dreamforce takes place Sept. 25-28 this year. Last year, according to Salesforce figures, 161,000 people registered for the San Francisco conference. The proposed contract was to provide free coffee to attendees, and Wrecking Ball was assured that lines regularly stretched into the hundreds of people. Cho and Rothgeb said the two companies talked about the previous subcontractor’s fee of $36,000 and agreed on a cap of $40,000.

As the Wrecking Ball co-CEOs finalized their proposal, news broke on July 19 that the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services was rejecting a $250,000 donation from Salesforce, which is headquartered in San Francisco, because of its relationship with the customs agency. CBP has been responsible for enforcing the Trump administration’s policy of separating the children of asylum-seekers from their parents, which the administration has since rescinded.

Salesforce announced in March that it had contracted with CBP to help with the agency’s recruiting and “drive efficiencies around how U.S. border activities are managed.”

Benioff has defended the contract, tweeting this month, “Salesforce always will be true to our core values. We don’t work with CBP regarding separation of families.” A Salesforce spokeswoman referred The Chronicle to Benioff’s statement.

Cho said that the couple has felt a personal connection to the U.S. government’s actions: He immigrated to the United States as a toddler, and Rothgeb’s father was born in the Philippines.

“Are we going to, as a lot of people do, turn a blind eye and say the world is dirty, nobody’s perfect, or is this a situation where we reject a $40,000 opportunity and make a statement?” Cho said.

The two have a small cafe on Union Street but a large social media presence, often taking the coffee industry to task around discrimination and racist or sexist imagery. They regularly travel around the world for trainings and competitions.

“Because we do occupy a thought-leader position, there’s more attention on what we do, and therefore there’s a burden of leadership,” Cho said.

“Business is going to have to be the resistance we want to see,” Rothgeb said. “That’s the truth. You can’t get anything done unless business is going to take a stand.”

The two submitted a bid Wednesday to serve coffee at Dreamforce if Salesforce withdraws from the CBP contract — but otherwise they said they were canceling the contract. A paragraph included a request for George P. Johnson Marketing to forward on to Salesforce: “We respectfully ask that Salesforce discontinue providing tools for CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” the two wrote. “We are requesting this discontinuation as a precondition of our agreement to provide coffee services at Dreamforce 2018.”

Benioff wrote in his tweet this month that Salesforce does not have an agreement with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

George P. Johnson Marketing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Forty thousand dollars may be small change for Salesforce, but for Wrecking Ball, it’s not money easily turned down.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.